Why your photos deserve a proper home

Most families in the UK have a quiet problem sitting in a drawer: a laptop from 2016, a phone with 40,000 photos on it, and a vague sense that none of it is really backed up. An external hard drive is the simplest, cheapest insurance policy you can buy for the pictures you'd be devastated to lose. But walk into any shop and you'll meet a wall of identical black boxes with numbers on them, all claiming to be fast, secure and reliable. Here's how to cut through it and pick one that suits family photos rather than a film studio.

How much capacity do you actually need?

Do a rough sum before you buy. A phone photo is typically 3–5MB. A JPEG from a decent camera runs 8–15MB. If you shoot RAW, budget 25–50MB per image. Video is the real glutton: a minute of 4K phone footage can easily be 150–200MB.

• 1TB — roughly 200,000 phone photos. Fine for a couple starting out, but tight once video appears.
• 2TB — the sensible sweet spot for most families. Portable drives in this size cost very little now.
• 4TB — comfortable if you shoot RAW, keep old phone backups, or have years of holiday video.
• 8TB and above — usually a desktop drive. Buy this size if you're consolidating several old machines into one archive.

Whatever you think you need, buy roughly double. Drives fill up faster than anyone expects, and the price difference between sizes is smaller than the hassle of upgrading in two years.

Portable or desktop?

There are two broad types, and the right answer depends on whether the drive will travel.

• Portable drives are palm-sized, powered by the USB cable, and typically hold 1–5TB. They're brilliant for carrying photos between home and a relative's house. Their weakness is physical: they're easy to lose, and easy to knock off a desk mid-write.
• Desktop drives are larger, need a mains socket, and start around 4TB. They're faster, cheaper per terabyte, and tend to last longer because they sit still. For a permanent family archive, this is usually the better buy.

A good compromise: one desktop drive as the main archive, plus a small portable one for the off-site copy you store elsewhere.

Speed: what actually matters

Ignore the marketing claims. For backing photos up, almost any modern drive is fast enough. A portable USB 3.0 drive writes at roughly 80–130MB per second; a desktop drive manages 150–250MB per second. Copying 50GB of photos takes under ten minutes either way.

Speed only becomes interesting if you plan to edit RAW files or video directly from the drive. In that case, look at an external SSD: silent, shock-resistant, and several times quicker — but noticeably more expensive per terabyte and usually smaller in capacity.

One trap worth knowing: some drives still ship with a USB 2.0 cable. That limits you to around 30–40MB per second and makes a perfectly good drive feel like dial-up. Check the cable, and use USB-C if your computer has it.

Reliability, and the features you can ignore

Every hard drive fails eventually. Mechanical drives have spinning platters and moving heads; SSDs are tougher but don't like sitting unpowered for years. Nobody can promise you forever, so plan for replacement instead.

What's genuinely worth paying for:

• A longer warranty — two years is the minimum, three to five suggests the maker has confidence.
• A plain, well-reviewed model — reputation matters more than any single specification.
• Quiet operation — you'll notice a whining drive more than a slightly slower one.

What you can safely skip: bundled encryption software, cloud tie-ins, phone apps, and anything requiring an account. These add complexity and often lock your photos behind a service that may not exist in five years. A bare drive that mounts like any other folder is a gift to your future self.

A backup routine you'll actually keep

The gold standard is the 3-2-1 rule: three copies of your photos, on two different types of storage, with one copy kept somewhere else. That sounds grand, but the family version is refreshingly simple.

• Set a monthly reminder — the first Sunday, say — and copy new photos from your phone and camera to the external drive.
• Keep a second copy on a cloud service or a second drive stored at a relative's house or in a locked drawer at work.
• Never edit directly on the backup drive. Work from your computer, then copy the finished set across once you're happy.
• Once a year, plug the drive in, open a few random folders, and check the files actually open. Silent failure is real.
• Write the date of the last backup on a label stuck to the drive. Future you will be grateful.

Finally, listen to your hardware. If a drive starts clicking, ticking or grinding, stop using it and copy everything off immediately. Replace drives every four or five years, before they give you a reason to. Done this way, protecting your family photos takes about ten minutes a month — and buys you decades of peace of mind.